Look at me, no head: How I found Sanity
Back to square one with a blog, this time it's headless. I've been using and playing with headless servers, nextjs, and nuxtjs for a couple years, but just never did it for myself. For me, Wordpress is just so much quicker to set up and use with DigitalOcean droplets, Docker, or just plane old LAMP servers from scratch. Isn't that a strange statement though?
With Sanity.io and Vercel or Netlify services, there is no need to maintain any server technology on the part of the admin. It's all up to the front end dev to set up and go. So why is this does it seem harder for me?
Well, I get antsy about dependencies. Weighing NPM dependencies for front end frameworks versus Wordpress dependencies like a very mature code base and LAMP tech that is as older than millenials, it's easy to see a difference.
Maybe that makes me a little more conservative than the previously mentioned millenials. Of course, this concern is the same concern that we're having all the time whenever the next technology comes along.
I'm not about to rehash all the conversations about cars, robots, server tech, code languages, etc, but you get the gist, right?
It's safe to say that there is always a vetting process which tends to look a little like Darwin's Natural Selection. The tech that survives and matures is generally the one spreads most successfully. In this case, React and JSON services are winners for now until another set of ideas proves out.
So why worry? Well, it's the SSR stuff that get's me a little nervous. My observations, while limited, have shown that SSR is awesome when combined with a client-side framework to ease server functions. Nonetheless, the SSR framework choices are still vast and it has not been very clear to me who will win out.
Nextjs, Nuxtjs, and Gatsby are obvious front-runners, so I've been reluctantly embracing them. But again, I don't know how mature they will get until the next SSR framework shows up to prove easier and more robust.
So that's my first post. I'll try to keep this up and probably stick to front end stuff as long as possible without getting in to politics and human events too much. Thank you for reading this far. You're my hero for doing so.